...building a new society within the shell of the old one.

September 29, 2006

From Jo Grimond to Leon Trotsky

As a naïve schoolboy, like many others, I became caught up
in Trotskyist politics. I was never a ‘good comrade’ being as likely to read Jo
Grimond or Bakunin as Marx and Trotsky but for a while the excitement of being
involved in clandestine politics (or so I fondly believed!) was enough. My
mother always said I would ‘read a toffee paper’ so stopping me reading
anything was always going to be difficult. I’m not sure I knew exactly what
being a Trot meant (as I suspect did many others involved with me) but somewhere
in it I was sure was the utopian idea of a better world. My involvement lasted
at most about two years and ceased when I went to University. I think by then
the endless factionalism had become simply too wearying so the physical move
provided a convenient excuse.

Because I read ‘outside the doctrine’ I found of course
much contradiction in what I read. At 18 finding ways to reconciling Grimond
and Trotsky was perhaps too much to expect. What always appealed to me though
was the idea of taking responsibility and control of one’s life –
something for which I suspect Jo Grimond had more sympathy than Trotsky. This
is why for me the attraction of Libertarianism is not in rampant individualism.
We do not live in isolation and our every action places us in some relationship
with others, requiring us to find some way to mediate those relationships. We
do so by recognising that our individual actions will have cumulative,
collective consequences and that ignoring those consequences is likely to place
our relationships in a mode of conflict. Taking responsibility for one’s own
actions is thus, pace Rand, a long way from ignoring the consequences of
those actions on others.

Comments

From Jo Grimond to Leon Trotsky

As a naïve schoolboy, like many others, I became caught up
in Trotskyist politics. I was never a ‘good comrade’ being as likely to read Jo
Grimond or Bakunin as Marx and Trotsky but for a while the excitement of being
involved in clandestine politics (or so I fondly believed!) was enough. My
mother always said I would ‘read a toffee paper’ so stopping me reading
anything was always going to be difficult. I’m not sure I knew exactly what
being a Trot meant (as I suspect did many others involved with me) but somewhere
in it I was sure was the utopian idea of a better world. My involvement lasted
at most about two years and ceased when I went to University. I think by then
the endless factionalism had become simply too wearying so the physical move
provided a convenient excuse.

Because I read ‘outside the doctrine’ I found of course
much contradiction in what I read. At 18 finding ways to reconciling Grimond
and Trotsky was perhaps too much to expect. What always appealed to me though
was the idea of taking responsibility and control of one’s life –
something for which I suspect Jo Grimond had more sympathy than Trotsky. This
is why for me the attraction of Libertarianism is not in rampant individualism.
We do not live in isolation and our every action places us in some relationship
with others, requiring us to find some way to mediate those relationships. We
do so by recognising that our individual actions will have cumulative,
collective consequences and that ignoring those consequences is likely to place
our relationships in a mode of conflict. Taking responsibility for one’s own
actions is thus, pace Rand, a long way from ignoring the consequences of
those actions on others.